Wendy Davis' new communications director

Appears to be just what she needs.

Democratic Sen. Wendy Davis’ campaign for governor has hired U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s former communications director.

Zac Petkanas, Davis’ new communications director, most recently was senior communications adviser for the Nevada State Democratic Party.

Before that, Petkanas was Reid’s communications director, and he was deputy communications director for Reid’s re-election campaign.

Not the 'Harry Reid' part.  This 'smashmouth' part.

In just the last few days, some members of the Capitol Press Corps have noticed a shift in how the Davis campaign is interacting with us. It also seems, for the moment at least, that the Davis folks are more nimble than before in reacting to events and seizing on chances to drive their narrative in the press.

[...]

After joining the Davis team, one of Petkanas’ first online statements about GOP nominee for governor Greg Abbott was that after the AG “campaigned with sex predator & fought equal pay for women, no wonder new GOP PAC hitting panic button in Texas." That’s apparently a reference to a new political action committee called Red State Women. As the name suggests, it’s an effort aimed at women here. It is also, one could argue, an attempt to counter any chance Davis might have at convincing GOP women to cross over and vote for the Democrat in November.

Even better is seeing the press releases this week also.

-- "Davis: Abbott took huge pay increase but fights equal pay for equal work" (on March 12, the same as his Tweet linked above)

-- DAVIS CAMPAIGN SLAMS ABBOTT’S SILENCE ON POTENTIALLY UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR ON CPRIT BOARD (yesterday)

The campaign Tweeted this to emphasize the first one, and Wayne Slater at the Dallas News wrote this in response to the second one.  So I would say Zac is off to a fast start.

Davis is in Beaumont today pumping up her volunteers, and my mother wants to go, so maybe I'll get a word or a photo with the candidate.  If I do, you'll hear about it.

Ted Cruz blames missing Malaysian jetliner on Obamacare

I'm sure there's more important headlines -- like Rick Perry getting booed on Jimmy Kimmel's SXSW remote, or Buc-ees desperately working to insure that the .1% of their customers who are registered to vote clearly understand that they are bipartisans, or even that the NSA has pretended to be Facebook as they tricked you into downloading malware -- but as winter finally breaks into a lovely spring (locally, at least), we'll go with this news.

BEIJING—The mystery surrounding the disappearance of the Malaysia Airlines jet over the weekend took a sinister turn today, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R—TX) revealed that two of the passengers on board had recently signed up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

“Although we cannot prove that this tragedy was caused by the White House’s misguided efforts at health-care reform, the math doesn’t lie,” said Cruz at a combined Tea Party/lobotomy convention. “Experts have said that the probability of two people getting Obamacare insurance and boarding a plane, and then having that plane crash, is less than one in a million.”

Cruz said it would be inappropriate to speculate on the exact mechanism by which health insurance could have caused the disaster, but noted that “crash” and “healthcare.gov” had appeared together in news articles more than ten thousand times in the last six months. “Everywhere we look, we see the President’s fingerprints on this,” he added.

In related news, the White House offered its condolences to the families of those presumed dead on the missing jet. “What makes this tragedy even worse,” said spokesman Jay Carney, “is that one of those passengers was supposed to make the final decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.”

Find more riveting stories like that here, and now in the perpetually updating blogroll at the right.